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Romantic Circles Blog

The special exhibit on William Hazlitt's 1824 work Spirit of the Age remains at The Wordsworth Museum at Dove Cottage through June 6. The Wordsworth Trust will publish a new edition of The Spirit of the Age to coincide with the exhibition, with a preface by Michael Foot and illustrated with the portraits from the exhibition. Besides Wordsworth and Coleridge, the exhibit includes portraits of Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, Leigh Hunt, and William Wilberforce. Tom Paulin reviews the exhibit in The Guardian for April 10.

SJ

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"New Views of Byron in Context," a one-day conference, Saturday 8 May 2004, organized by the Newstead Byron Society and the Midland Romantic Seminar, held at the Nottingham Trent University Clifton Campus, Ada Byron King Building. See the International Byron Society's event page.

At Newstead Abbey: a new exhibition, 1 April - 30 September 2004, Byron at Southwell: Randy and Rebellious, previously unseen material highlighting Byron's rebellious and amorous youth in Nottinghamshire and focusing on his friendship with the Pigot family of Southwell.
Charles E. Robinson
Exec. Director
The Byron Society of America

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Earlier today, May 1, BBC Radio Four broadcast a news item on the Bodleian Library's appeal to purchase the Abinger papers. (See this previous posting on the RC blog.)

Broadcast on "Today," the UK's premier current affairs program, with a daily audience of 8 million, this was a brief conversation between Rebecca Jones, the BBC Arts correspondent, Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, and scholar and editor Pamela Clemit. The conversation can be heard (in Real Audio format) at this link:

We are delighted to announce the upcoming NASSR 2004 conference to be held 9-12 September 2004 at the Millennium Hotel in beautiful and sublime Boulder, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Many thanks to those of you who submitted proposals (you should have heard from us by now; if not, please contact us). Participants can look forward to four days of intellectually stimulating ideas and discussions and to splendid plenaries by Ann Bermingham (Santa Barbara), Angela Esterhammer (Western Ontario), and David Simpson (Davis).

The theme of our conference, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, provides an opportunity to query our period from the perspectives of the international, the global, the cosmic, the worldly, and the sophisticated. The term expands upon certain notions of region and place that some would deem central to the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism. It also invites us to think about alternatives to more typical moves to organize Romantic culture either around individuals or nation-states.

There are several exciting features of NASSR 2004 we would like to tell you about. These opportunities are available to anyone who would like to participate in the conference, regardless of whether you are giving a paper.

Another pre-conference seminar on the "Import Of Romantic Drama" is being organized by Tom Crochunis, Catherine Burroughs, Alex Dick, and Michael Eberle-Sinatra. It will include a hands-on performance workshop conducted by Gilli Bush-Bailey and Jacky Bratton as well as plenary papers by Tracy Davis and Michael Gamer, and a panel on current projects on romantic drama and theater. If you wish to sign up for these, please look for registration information (forthcoming) on the NASSR 2004 website.

* * Second, for those not giving papers as well as those who are, we will be including 12 discussion workshops on September 10th and 11th run by the following scholars: James Chandler; Lisa Plummer Crafton; Thomas Crochunis, Elizabeth Fay; Denise Gigante; Theresa Kelley; Dennis Low; Jerome McGann; Brad Mudge; Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk; Anne Wallace and Tony Harrison; and Joshua Wilner. These workshop leaders will guide an intensive group discussion of specific Romantic texts and their implications. For more information on titles and how to register, please go to the NASSR 2004 website.

* * * * Fourth, we will have fun: at the banquet there will be a performance by the Ron Paris Band, presenting "Sweet Soul Music," followed by dancing. There will also be opportunities to walk on Boulder's gorgeous mountain trails in the mornings.

Graduate Students: The NASSR 2004 organizing committee is pleased to announce that there will be prizes awarded for the best papers presented at the conference by graduate students who are current NASSR members. Travel Bursaries are also available. For more information, please go to the Nassr 2004 website.

There will be a performance of Fanny Burney's The Witlings during the conference. We welcome a wide range of papers on the conference theme and related issues. Topics might include but should not be limited to the following:

Please submit 1-2 page abstracts for individual presentations and panel proposals by October 31, 2004. Please include a cover sheet with your name, address, phone number, email address, institutional affiliation and a brief biographical paragraph. Please do not include any identifying information
on your abstract. Proposals may be sent via regular mail to:

British Women Writers Conference
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Department of English
PO Box 44691
Lafayette, LA 70504

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Walter Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses edited by Gerard Carruthers and Alison Lumsden is to be published today, April 23rd, 2004, by Edinburgh University Press. Until now unpublished, this work was commissioned from Scott in 1830 as a guide to his home and library at Abbotsford. Instead, Scott produced a semi-fictional account of "Trotcosey House" in which he both sent himself up in his antiquarian interests and also, at the same time, insisted that physical artefacts and books have a great deal of meaningful,imaginative human history attached to them. Scott's son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart and others mindful to protect the powerful reputation of the "Wizard of the North" deemed the work, incomplete at Scott's death in 1832, unworthy of publication. However, in spite of impaired physical capacities as the result of several strokes, Scott produced a more cogent work than was thought to be the case. Conservative editorial practices in this edition show that beneath the poor handwriting and the seeming semantic difficulty, the text can be made over ninety per cent intelligible. Particularly interesting in the book, perhaps, are Scott's comments on bibliophile matters and his taste in popular culture (including witchcraft, ballads and popular tracts).

Gerry Carruthers
University of Glasgow

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The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Europe a Prophecy copy H. The only monochrome copy of the nine extant copies printed by Blake, copy H was printed c. 1795. Now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, it joins copies B, E, and K in the Archive and will be joined by copies A and D in the near future. Europe is dated 1794 on its title plate and the first six copies were color printed that year, followed in 1795 by two more copies. Copies B and E are from the first printing session and copy K is from the last printing session, c. 1818. With the addition of copy H, the printing history of Europe is fully represented in the Archive.
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Andrea Laue, technical editor
The William Blake Archivehttp://www.blakearchive.org/

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"ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 9 — William Bolcom's gigantic, well-more-than-two-hour setting of William Blake's complete 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience' poetic cycle is enormously difficult and expensive to perform. Looking down at the forces assembled for the University of Michigan performance in Hill Auditorium here on Thursday night [APRIL 8] was a mega-Mahlerian experience, with a stage extension needed to accommodate the nearly 500 musicians (bigger than the forces of any Mahler 'Symphony of a Thousand' I have encountered). All that was missing were lighting effects and projections of Blake's engravings, suggested in the score. But they were on display in the lobby. . . ." [read the entire review]

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I thought you might be interested of a small local production based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, based on the experiences of the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati in Geneva. It is an all original script called "the Monster Makers" written and directed by Louis B. Hobson.

It puts on a theatre stage an account of what might have transpired between the five characters of Lord George Byron, Dr. John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Godwin. It opens April 13 at the pumphouse theatres in Calgary, Alberta and goes until April 20. A shortened version recently won the Calgary regional one-act play festival, and this also will be used for the Alberta provincial one-act play festival.

Sincerely,
David C. Hume

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Scholar, journalist, and political activist Michael Foot, 90, officially opened a an exhibition on William Hazlitt at the Wordsworth museum in Dove Cottage in Grasmere last Saturday. In interviews Foot confirmed that most of the 1,000 volumes in his Hazlitt collection will pass to the Wordsworth Trust when he dies. The Trust has published a new edition of The Spirit of the Age to coincide with the exhibition and dedicated it to Mr Foot. (See the story in the Guardian.)